Message from discussion
Crimes Against Mimesis, Pt. 2
From: Roger Giner-Sorolla <gi...@xp.psych.nyu.edu>
Subject: Crimes Against Mimesis, Pt. 2
Date: 1996/04/18
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.960416152259.25532B-100000@xp.psych.nyu.edu>
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organization: New York University
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[This part of the essay contains medium-grade spoilers for the games
Adventure, Christminster and Theater, and non-spoiler references to a
couple of the Zork puzzles.]
So far, I've been looking at the ways that IF games can lose their power
as works of fiction by poor contextualization of objects, locations and
puzzles. The second half of my critical rogues' gallery encloses a more
insidious set of offenses. In this part of the essay, and the next part,
I'll cover those "Crimes Against Mimesis" that are provoked by the
structure of the puzzle-based adventure game itself.
Problems of contextualization can usually be fixed by better writing and
planning of the existing game. But many of the problems I'll cover below
are harder to deal with. In these examples, a feature which offends the
sense of reality is often convenient to the programmer or game player. To
exclude it would make writing the game more difficult, or playing the game
less satisfying.
Still, striving toward this goal can do a lot to improve the quality of a
game as a work of fiction, while keeping its play enjoyable. My insidious
aim is to get the writer/programmer who would spend the same X hours doing
up a sprawling 200-room mega-dungeon to spend the same X hours
constructing a tighter, smaller, but fictionally more meaningful and
satisfying game. (Of course, some writers have been moving in that
direction on their own -- I'm thinking specifically of the improvement in
fictional atmosphere from Magnus Olsson's "Dunjin" to his "Uncle Zebulon's
Will"...)
Now, onwards.
4. Lock-and-Key, and Four Ways Out
The most common problem in any interactive game is the lock-and-key
puzzle. The solver starts out with an object, or "key", and has to find
a place where this key can be used to gain access to another "key", which
in turn allows access to another ... and so on, until the final goal is
reached.
Sometimes, a lock-and-key puzzle makes no pretensions to be anything
else, as with the red, blue and yellow keys in "Doom." And, of course,
literal locks and keys appear in more sophisticated games, most notably
"Christminster." Actual locks and keys can enhance or reduce a game's
fictional realism, depending on whether they are presented in appropriate
contexts. One can only find so many keys inside fishes' bellies, lost in
the wainscotting, dropped at random in corridors, or hanging around guard
dogs' necks before the artifice of the puzzle structure becomes painfully
clear. By contrast, all six of the keys in "Christminster" are hidden in
places where one might actually keep a key, and all their locks are
guarding places that one would expect to be locked; moreover, we end the
game with a pretty clear idea of who normally uses each key and why.
But more often, an IF game will keep the basic logic of the lock-and-key
puzzle, but use other objects to implement it. A hungry frog bars the
entrance; it will only let you pass if you give it a live fly. The bridge
is broken; you can only get across it using the plank you found at the
construction site. The key can be a found object, a character or creature
whom you've convinced to follow you, a piece of information like a
password; the lock can be an obstacle to another location, or an object
that requires another object to be useful, such as a corked bottle.
Disguising "locks-and-keys" as real-world objects may superficially
contribute to the realism of the atmosphere, but once the player figures
out what is going on, the artifice of the one-on-one mapping between
objects and problems becomes even more jarring. Graham Nelson identified
this, in "The Craft of Adventure", as the Get-X-Use-X syndrome. Give the
goat a tin can, and it will cough up a red handkerchief; wrap the
handkerchief around your head, and the gypsies will let you into the cave;
use the lantern you found in the cave to get past the giant mole; and so
on. These pat, lock-and-key solutions don't really do justice to the
complex process of real-world problem-solving, and after a while they get
boring even as abstract puzzles.
Fortunately, there are many structural remedies to the predictability of
the lock-and-key game. Let's consider five:
a) Solutions requiring more than one object
It's not a novel idea that a problem might require more than one object
to solve. Adventure and the original Zork both had a couple of
multi-object conundrums -- the chained bear; the exorcism in Hell; the
explosive and fuse -- and in general, these went a long way towards making
the puzzles more realistic and interesting.
Still, a multi-object puzzle can come off as artificial. In particular,
the scavenger hunt for the various components of a Very Significant Object
is one of the stalest chestnuts in modern fantasy literature, derived (as
usual) from Tolkien's _Lord of the Rings_ trilogy with its Nine Rings of
Power: Collect 'em all for World Domination!
The Quest for Prefab Parts is to plot structure what the Quonset Hut is to
architecture. It shows up in innumerable role-playing game scenarios,
assembly-line sword-and-sorcery novels, and seasons of "Doctor Who"; and,
from what I've seen, not even the best IF games can completely keep away
from this device. If the author doesn't make the "pieces" interesting
objects in their own right, and plausibly integrate them into the
storyline, he or she can expect some eye-rolling from the sophisticated
reader ("Not the Six Shards of the Dinner Plate of the Gods again!") As an
example, the task of piecing together the diary in "Theater" is much more
believable than the task of collecting the four "eye gems" which comes
later on in the same game.
b) Objects relevant to more than one solution
Again, multi-purpose objects had their start early on in text adventure
games -- the original "Adventure", for one. As I recall, the second use
for the keys in that game popped up just about at the point where I
had arrived at the one-object, one-puzzle principle by induction, and
started confidently leaving things lying by the puzzles they solved. How
annoying to trek back to the surface for the keys!
But my assumptions were fair game for a clever designer, and nowadays
it's expected that a good IF game will require the player to find more
than one use for a number of objects. In general, fictional realism is
thereby improved; the player must jettison the comfortable "lock-and-key"
rule, which bore little resemblance to the messy process of real-world
problem-solving. However, most games nowadays allow near-unlimited
carrying capacity, and the result is an equally bizarre Model Player who
takes and keeps *everything* just in case it might prove useful later on
-- a Crime Against Mimesis in its own right; number 6, I believe.
c) Problems having more than one solution
To my mind, the crucial difference between a "puzzle" and a real-world
problem is that the real problem has more than one possible solution.
This is true even of such a barren, abstract task as knocking a banana down
from a 10-foot ceiling with only a chair and a yard-long pole. Chimps
are usually able to "stand on chair" and "hit banana with pole," proving
that Homo sapiens is not the only tool-user around. This human, not to be
outdone by a mere Pan Troglodytes, came up with:
> throw chair at banana
> balance chair on pole and hit banana with chair
> hold pole and jump at banana
> knock on door. shout for experimenter. threaten experimenter with
lawsuit. experimenter, get the banana
Perhaps the Model Adventure-game Player is a chimpanzee? But all joking
aside, few puzzles in any game are set up to admit this variety of
solutions, and the reason is simple: the Model Adventure-game Programmer
is only human. Game designers would rather spend time coding a variety of
locations than implementing every second-string solution to a problem like
the banana one, where the most likely solution is indeed the chimp's way.
Players would rather play a game with a variety of challenges, and to this
end, are willing to accept some restriction in possibilities, especially
where the alternative solutions are less obvious than the intended one.
All the same, nothing cries "This is a game, not a story!" louder than a
puzzle that ignores obvious and reasonable attempts to solve it. By
convention, some crude solutions are generally excluded: breaking things,
burning things, hitting or killing creatures. The default messages for
such actions in Inform and TADS imply that the protagonist is just not the
type to take a sword to the Gordian Knot -- a Doctor Who or Miss Marple,
not a Rambo. Even with this healthy assumption in place, many puzzles
break the fictional mood by accepting only one plausible, but rather
unusual solution, when there are more straightforward ways to go.
As an example, look at the opening scene of Christminster. The problem
is to rouse a man who is sleeping on a key, just enough so he'll roll over
without waking. The solution is to tickle him with a feather (this isn't
such a terrible spoiler, since getting the feather is really the hard
part). As a puzzle this makes sense, but as a real-world problem it's
hard to see why you can't just tickle the old codger with your fingers,
even though the game doesn't understand "hands," "fingers," or "tickle
man" without an indirect object. Anyway, the message to the player is
clear: "Be creative ... my way!" And the hand of the puzzle author
intrudes on the scene.
An IF writer who wants to avoid this problem has three options:
(1) to allow the alternative solution;
(2) to have the alternative solution turn out to be a wrong one even
though it apparently works at the time (e.g., tickling the man with your
hands is too strong a stimulation; he wakes up in the next turn and
catches you stealing the key);
(3) to program in a plausible, specific reason why the alternative
solution is not allowable, in place of the default "You can't do that"
message (e.g., "Touching a strange man with your hands would be ... well,
improper.").
Of these, the second is the most interesting; it gives the player at
least a nudge in the right direction, while allowing the author to retain
control over the puzzle structure. In all fairness, the player should be
able to figure out beforehand that the alternative solution is not the
best one, or else be given a chance to do it over the right way. A good
example of a well-clued "wrong" alternative solution would be feeding a
hungry swine with a rare string of pearls that's needed later on, when the
beast will just as gladly wolf down a handful of acorns.
d) Objects irrelevant to problems and problems without solutions
A player who is only interested in the game tends to see irrelevant
objects and unsolvable problems as unsporting annoyances; "red herrings"
planted by a fiendish game designer, in defiance of the implicit rule that
everything is relevant and the task is to find out which thing is relevant
to which. Because coding up a lot of useless objects and locations is
hard work, designers generally agree. Most games today subsume irrelevant
objects into the scenery, leaving only a couple of ringers. Even then it
is considered sporting to flag useless items as such, usually with a hint
or a more-or-less witty pun on the phrase "red herring."
If we see the game as more than a collection of puzzles, though, a game
feature can have nothing to do with any puzzle and still contribute to the
atmosphere or the storyline. "Smart red herrings" like the gargoyle and
the chapel in Christminster strengthen the background of the game with
additional information (even if the meaning of the initials on the
gargoyle is somewhat, ahem, obscure). At the same time, they effectively
rebut the creeping suspicion that all the features in the environment are
dictated by one puzzle or another, and serve notice that the fictional
milieu has a life outside of the mere game which is being played out
inside it. Even the "shadowy figure" red herring in the original
Adventure is eventually explained in terms of the game's rudimentary
background (those vain dwarves!) Consequently, the player feels satisfied,
rather than frustrated, when its true nature is revealed. To sum up, in
the well-written IF game, every item and location should still serve
some purpose; but the puzzle-game shouldn't be the only purpose.
[In my next installment: thoughts on the IF protagonist, NPC's, and the
goals of the game itself]
Roger Giner-Sorolla New York University gi...@xp.psych.nyu.edu
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Department of Psychology ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Sur l'oreiller du mal c'est Satan Trismegiste
qui berce longuement notre esprit enchante' ..." -- Baudelaire